Santa Rosa + Vista: Three Notebooks Reviewed. Page 18

We will take three mobile computers – Asus A8Sc, Toshiba Satellite A100-906 and Lenovo Thinkpad T61 - and will investigate the features and performance of mobile Santa Rosa platform in Windows Vista operating system.

General Performance

The new version of SYSmark testing suite, SYSmark2007, that measures the systems performance in real applications arrived right in time for our tests. As a result, we managed to check out the notebooks performance in real tasks.

You should pay special attention to the results of Asus A8Sc and Toshiba Satellite A100-906 on the diagram above. These mobile systems are based on different platforms, Santa Rosa and Napa Refresh, however, their processors work at almost the same clock frequency of 1.8GHz.

As we see from the obtained results, the new mobile platform allows building faster notebooks. There are a lot of factors contributing to it, and we have already pointed them out above. However, the advantage we observe here is hardly determinative. The performance difference between Asus A8Sc and Toshiba Satellite A100-906 doesn’t exceed 10%. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at the detailed score charts.

This test deals with creating videos using non-linear editing and special effects. The videos are put together from several sources, including static images. The final video is made in two formats: HD and for online internet viewing. In this case the following applications are involved: Adobe After Effects 7, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 and Sony Vegas 7. And again Santa Rosa demonstrates a slight advantage. Only Lenovo Thinkpad T61 mobile computer performs impressively here, as it features a faster CPU and more system memory than its two rivals.

The last test deals with creating an architectural presentation with a photorealistic image of the object and a fly-around video of the projected building. There are only two applications used: AutoDesk 3ds Max 8 and SketchUp 5. Of course, processor computational resources are being loaded the most in applications of this kind that is why the results of Santa Rosa and Napa Refresh platforms with processors working at almost the same frequencies are quite close.